WoW NIA journey: day 5 (update: days 6-8)

[CmdrRickHunter]

I just felt I should share my experience using NIA to control my WoW character.

I got my NIA on Thursday (Jan 15). Thursday and Friday I played around with a profile which failed. The brain is simply not good at tying forward and backwards to the same frequency. I like to pretend those days don't really exist.

Day 3: The working setup:

Reading up on the stickied post on controlling the box with EEG only, I separated movement out across 4 different brainfingers. I'd originally avoided this because NIA only supports 4 joysticks at once. I didn't want to spend all of my joysticks on silly movement! The stickied post pointed out that the NIA developers, in lazyness or insight, allow multiple instances of the software. If there's a dev reading this, PLEASE keep that feature in!

I tied alpha2/alpha3 to forward/backwards and beta2/beta3 to left/right (or is it right/left? I can't remember offhand). Like in the sticky thread, I made the forward button slightly easier to trigger than the rest. This has a minimal effect, but early on is nice because moving forward feels more like a success. I ramped the smoothness down quite a bit, but not all the way. I think its at .1

Lets take a moment to talk grounding. By UL law, grounds need a 1MOhm resistance if they're to touch human flesh. According to other posts, this means they aren't sufficient to kill the signals coursing through our bodies. I haven't tested my static wriststrap yet, maybe I'll post on that later. My ground is a length of speaker wire with both ends stripped. One end is screwed into my computer case (one of the side panel screws). I wrap the other end around my little toe. Please recognize that doing so is "dangerous" and you should decide if the risk of electrocution is worth it. It'd be pretty embarrassing to have a lawsuit directed at me when someone wraps a piece of wire around their little toe in a lightning storm and bites it! I do always feel like I'm about to commit suicide by electrocution every time I wrap the ground around my toe. I keep looking for the nearby toaster and bathtub to complete the scene!

Macabre safety aside, grounding DRAMATICALLY improves the signal I get. I live in AZ, and play in a room with 2 full computers and a laser printer. I'm lucky to get a signal near the green line. Grounded, I can easily get to 1/3 or 1/4 of the green line! And I find grounding to a little toe doesn't get in the way of my playing!

One last detail: I've turned both EOG and EEG slightly down (if you're on calibration, clicking on the numbers in the lower right corner of the graph will bring up sliders). Fiddle with it. I certainly don't have it perfect!

On the FPS games, the mouse is king. The usual argument made by naysayers of NIA is that the mouse is giving us enough control that random stick wiggling would be sufficient to play. I challenged this. All of my movement is mouseless. left/right turn me left/right, not strafe. This is the real thing!

The result? If you were on my server this weekend, you'd have seen someone doing a VERY good drunk impersonation, including a surprisingly sound ability to run into walls no matter how straight the path might be!

The first day was rather random. I was ecstatic to get to control a computer character with my mind (a dream of mine since I was 8), so even my drunken meanderings were worthwhile! I did notice a lot of "collision" where I'd spike both forward and backwards simultaneously and lock the two of them up. The only time I never seemed to lock up is when I was staring over the water... I always somehow managed to jump in =(

Time spent in game that day: about an hour

Day 4:
Still ever drunk, I decided to be my character's babysitter, declaring she wouldn't leave Dalaran. I even took her tiger mount keys away (she never did realize that druids can fly)! Once again, stumbling began. Rather quickly I noticed a difference. I was colliding less. My controls felt far better. "I may be out of control, but its a good feeling".

I took the time this day to adjust my joysticks. Before launching, hit the "adjust button" for each joystick, and fiddle. By day 2, I had signals which at least looked like real signals, so I could adjust something.

Day 5:
Feeling masochistic, I decided to take NIA out for a spin. I chose to do the Blue Sky Logging quest "Replacement Parts." Basically, I had to grab 4 gears, 3 cogs, and 2 springs. I chose this quest because I knew I still didn't have control, and I wanted a quest which would give me some credit for random walking. I set forth the rules
- I could turn NIA off once I was at one of the items I needed. I can't sit still yet, so it would be very hard to pick something up. I could not, however, turn it off and then face the item. I had to be in range, facing it, or nothing at all
- I "lost a life" if I fell in the water and couldn't get out within a short period of time. When this happens, I'd turn NIA off, pull myself out to a nearby spot on land, then turn NIA back on.

I started off, and very quickly grabbed the first 2 gears. Randomness was going to be more friendly than I'd planned... or so I thought. It turns out that only gears spawn nearby to where I started. Worse yet, my random walk circle was rather small. Maybe 35-50yds in diameter. Random Walk circle is my measurement of how the randomness of the control could help/hurt me. Since I was using left/right to turn, truly random action would result in moving in a random direction each time. The Random Walk circle was where I could be expected to be if I wasn't controlling anything at all.

I ran into the nearby shredder a few times. I learned to loathe the gear train (which my character LOVED! Getting stuck in the gear train was her favorite pastime). I picked up a few more items for the quest. Then it hit me. I was SUBSTANTIALLY outside my random walk circle. Even more interesting was that I still had a relatively reliable random walk circle, it had just shifted IN THE DIRECTION I NEEDED TO GO.

Yes, 5 days having NIA, and not cheating at all, I had had a (ever so small) conscious effect on where my character went!:thumbs:

The last item I had to get, of course, would prove me wrong. I had a _REALLY_ hard time getting the last item. There was only one on the field, and my frustration was mounting. I noticed a very strong correlation... the more I was frustrated, the more conflicts I had, like shaking a fist. I'd lost 2 lives getting the first pieces, and I ended up loosing 3 more. I decided to call it quits, set myself within 30yds of the item, and waited for my random walk circle to pick it up.


Success so far? I say so. While I still mostly random walk, with only 5 days under my belt I DID move consciously towards my target. I'd estimate I moved 2-3 diameters, which is not something that happens by chance every day.

More important: I completed a single quest in WoW using only NIA for movement

Takeaways:
- Grounding is KING (and totally not UL certified!)
- Design profiles like muscles. If there's opposite motions, make sure there's complimentary signals.
- Servers fill up more often when you only have 20 minutes to play
- Just stop if you get frustrated. If your muscles are tensing, so are your new brain muscles!
- You _CAN_ control a character, not using a mouse at all!

[hellv1l]

hmmmm im still having trouble in controlling with eeg only and glance is a little bit random...

i tried it with autohotkey and a small script to control my mouse pointer but not good for a start

[CmdrRickHunter]

Day 6:
This day sucked. Outright sucked. I was in a rush to get my 1 quest's worth of NIA practice in. I was jerkey, it was ugly. I felt like I'd taken two steps backwards from day 5. I had to cheat all over the place to finish the quest

Day 7:
On day seven, the NIA rested.

Day 8:
After my weekly WoW raid, I decided to play more with NIA. I had to make up for day 6 something AWEFUL. I booted it up, and I saw a lot of the same spastic stuff. But I also saw something I'd never thought I'd see - reactions. If I was looking at something I wanted (a quest item), moved towards it, then turned, there was an INSTANT jerk response to turn back (often overcorrecting). This was hopeful!

I decided that there may be too much randomness to the system. To start I had to have my settings high enough that random twitches of alpha and beta would move or turn my character. If I was seeing intelligent reactions, then I was actually controlling it, which means...

I tuned all of the sensitivities waay down. I think some of them were all the way down to 6 or 7. Left and right were around 8. I went back to the game. HOLY COW. I was in control

I could now see two clear patterns develop.
a) random walk - with no target in sight, I walked in a slightly loopy pattern
b) fixation - when I wanted something, about 1/5 of the time I could fixate on this. When I did, I would immediatly turn towards it. Once locked on, any turning was always immediatly followed by a correction (rarely overcorrecting). I could actually choose to walk towards my target.

Random walk is clearly a boring thing that we see a lot of with NIA, so I'll focus on the fixation pattern.

I still don't have much control over forward and backwards. When in a fixation pattern, I tend to use them correctly (I rarely step in the wrong direction). However, more than once I found myself staring down the cog or spring I needed simply unable to take a step. More work will be needed I guess

When fixated on something, I really didn't have control over whether or not I turned. If locked on, I'd do little jigs on and off the target. If not locked on, I couldn't initiate a turn, but when a turn did come, it was in the right direction probably 70% or more of the time. It was frighteningly efficient. I'd also underturn about 50% of the time, overturn 20%, and at least 30% I'd snap DEAD ON to the target.

I even managed to walk around something where I kept underturning, but kept doing it in the same direction. Then I suddenly whipped around, to point in the right direction.

Much of this felt VERY similar (disturbingly similar) to a baby developing motor control, reaching out to their parents finger to grab it. I've started seeing more and more multiple part patterns. I see the lockon pattern (I can look back at something). I see a "run straight" pattern (where I run forward. The INSTANT I turn, I stop and correct the movement - about 40% of the time correctly, the rest overcorrecting. Some overcorrections get re-corrected back on line).

The gaming degenerated after I got about half of the items. These NIA "muscles" clearly fatigue. I kept tweaking my sensitivtiy and movement, increasing the amount of response (does anyone know the diff between the two?). By the end, I was a bit too random, no longer having as much fun... but that feeling of a baby's first grasp stuck with me.

Takeaways:
- Bad days _DO_ happen
- Days off can help when NIA scares you
- Learn with high sensitivity. Then, slowly turn it down to minimize the randomness that you relied on in the early training
- Fatigue happens. Mine sets in in about 20 minutes. I loose some control when that happens
- You should see baby like behavior. Analyze it lightly (not too heavily - heavy analysis can lead to beta waves).

[maxfraguas]

Hi congratulations on your post. I´m thinking about buying a NIA, but first I would like to know, if a can use the NIA as a mouse computer to control windows operating system? Simple things like open files or navigate through windows...

Thanks in advance for your anwser.

[CmdrRickHunter]

Its not really designed for it. Nothing stops you from designing a profile which uses mousekeys to move around the screen, but the interface has no built in mouse support.

I think that might be part of the agreement with Brainfingers. Brainfingers sells a far more expensive device which captures higher quality signals for use with the disabled. It has a mouse option. It seems that, if this thing could do mouse work for cheap, Brainfingers would have a hard time selling the higher quality version.

One thing you can do is turn on mouse keys and take advantage of the HOLD modes to emulate the behavior of a joystick (give it a duty cycle. .1 on .1 off would move half as fast as .2 on)

[oritpro]

Thanks for reporting on your experience with the NIA. I spent a couple of weeks with it and could not advance beyond simple jaw and eyebrow movements with much accuracy. In other words, Brainfingers was absolutely useless for gaming. However, it might prove useful for generating random numbers to seed encryption keys with. I'll have to try interfacing it with Truecrypt one of these days.

Anyway, they say the NIA takes a lot of practice to master, but I figure two weeks should be enough time to make some kind of progress which I didn't.

At this point I am just not sold on the NIA as a serious gaming device, especially for WoW or FPS type games. This thing just isn't ready for prime time and I say this knowing that there ARE devices out there that really work, they're just way outside of the average gamers budget.

Oh well, the [NIA] packaging makes a nice book end.

[Eagleizer]

Thanks for sharing your learning curve!
I`ve added this thread to my favorites.
Please continue to share your experience!

[Anikkin]

Sorry, I haven't posted in a long time. I've been using the NIA since about June 2008. I posted for a bit then dropped off. I have been able to work with the NIA in Vista 32bit, 64bit and now Windows 7 beta. I use it a lot to play LOTRO (Lord of the Rings Online) and found that it works great for all movement. I still have to use my # keys to execute moves in battle (there's no getting around that). The best thing is just running around in any direction except being very carefull on cliff areas. I fell off to many times and broke my legs often until I got the hang of it. I even died a few times. I will agree with you on the fatigue. It seems to set in for me after about an hour. It started in about 10 minutes before I had to put the NIA down. I have managed to work it up to about an hour now but it sure takes a long time building up the resistance to fatigue.
I solved my grounding issue by strapping the box to my leg with velcro so if I have to get up it's easy.

I have been using it routinely for the last 6 months playing LOTRO, have even done a few raids with no issues other then fatigue. When that happens I turn off the NIA and use the mouse. As you know spending 1 hour in the game is not very long at all but using the NIA is still fun.

[CmdrRickHunter]

awesome to hear some else suceeding at this!

Whats your experiance with using the mouse to turn (as opposed to strafe). I'm doing it to raise the difficulty curve and to ensure I can't 'cheat' myself.

[Anikkin]

I don't use the mouse to turn. I use glance. I also don't look around (strafe) while running. It took a long time to get that to work right but once I got used to it I found that it came fairly easy. I use a twitch to basically toggle on/off running. I started it with walking (by having hit the delete key in LOTRO you would walk). As I run I basically glance to turn in either direction. At first this was so clumsy because I would keep turning and run in a circle. All my glance movements were exaggerated. I had virtually no control. I kept working with it and eventually it became easier and now I basically look a bit beyond where I want to turn instead of glancing off the edge of the monitor. As I got used to it I started to do it in run mode and everything got a bit exaggerated again because things happened faster. I hope this makes sense. So now when I move it has become fairly natural but still some work (thus fatigue sets in). I had issues with messing up when I was running because I would look at my messaging box when having to read what someone wrote like in ooc. I ended up turning that stuff off and I play the game with a headset only. When people type it's converted to voice or when I am grouped we are all talking to each other. The hard part is when I have to run and talk at the same time, I toggle my movement off. I got to the point where I just don't talk while I'm running.
There are some drawbacks to using the NIA with an RPG like there is a very large learning curve. I can't look around while I run unless I use the mouse also. Things like communicating with others doesn't work well if you are on the move. If I want to just stand around in game and talk then I toggle the NIA off. I also found that I have to recalibrate everytime when I am getting ready to play. Some of these things I expect to solve once I tackle the Alpha, Beta thing which I know will be the most difficult to master if I can at all.
The real benefit I have is that my right arm tendonitis is not irritated by playing any more. This was the result I was looking for so the product works for me. I don't play FPS games because they give me headaches. I tried with the NIA and found that it works really well for my arm but not my head. Hope that helps